


HOLD FAST

by lieutenant_isaac



Category: The Terror (TV 2018)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Ex-lovers on a melancholy road trip over haunted ground, Gen, Low-key existentialist overtones, M/M, Past Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Post-Canon, Tattoos, Trauma
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-15
Updated: 2021-03-15
Packaged: 2021-03-23 03:20:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,849
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30049119
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lieutenant_isaac/pseuds/lieutenant_isaac
Summary: As Inuksak spoke and I translated, we heard one of the men outside the tent get up and walk out over the thick new snow. I thought nothing of it – I assumed he had other business – but an extraordinary change came about Sir James.He lifted his head, looked behind him. His expression showed only a slight strain, but to me, accustomed to reading that rigid face, it was the look of Lot. Inuksak fell silent. Then Sir James rose and bolted. At the departing back of the man, he shouted, “Frank!"An excerpt from the diaries of Dr. John Macpherson, who traveled with Sir James Clark Ross as translator and guide on his 1850 expedition to search for Franklin’s lost men.
Relationships: Francis Crozier/James Clark Ross
Comments: 15
Kudos: 30





	HOLD FAST

_An excerpt from the diaries of Dr. John Macpherson, who traveled with Sir James Ross as translator and guide on his 1850 expedition to search for Franklin’s lost men._

12th June.

[...]Inuksak, whom I have met before, agreed to tell us what he knew. As we questioned him, I saw Sir James becoming increasingly distraught. I had been for some weeks increasingly concerned for him, with the rumors of the expedition’s fate growing fresher and more dire as we approached King William Land. He is a man above fifty with vast experience of the polar regions, and I am sure he remembers well the end of his uncle’s expedition at Fury Beach. Nonetheless, he has the rigidity of the retired man who has pegged his memories to the wall and shut the door on them, only to bring them out when asked by a sufficiently pretty young lady or a sufficiently plump book contract. He clearly takes no pleasure in releasing them now. 

And then it happened. As Inuksak spoke and I translated, we heard one of the men outside the tent get up and walk out over the thick new snow. I thought nothing of it – I assumed he had other business – but an extraordinary change came about Sir James. 

He lifted his head, looked behind him. His expression showed only a slight strain, but to me, accustomed to reading that rigid face, it was the look of Lot. Inuksak fell silent. Then Sir James rose and bolted. At the departing back of the man, he shouted, “Frank!”

I exchanged glances with Inuksak and then turned more fully to stare at the scene. The departing man – tall for an inhabitant of these regions, and with a slightly limping, rolling gait – had continued his walk away, and now Sir James gave chase. The man stopped. I half-rose from my seat on the ground, but I am too tall for such low tents and it took me a moment to stumble to my feet. In that moment, Sir James caught hold of the man’s arm and looked him in the face.

I cannot describe Sir James’ expression. It was shock and utter distress mingled, mouth open and breath wild. His hand left the man’s arm for a moment, clutched it again. I could not tell if he would embrace him or hit him, whether he would howl or weep. 

The man seemed frozen in his grip. Whatever emotions played out on his own face were lost beneath his heavy hood. Perhaps it was this, more than anything, that made Sir James wrench him around in fury to face Inuksak and bark, “You lied to me!” The phrase, and the obscenity which followed it, needed no translation.

Inuksak started to his feet, and I saw the other men sitting outside the tent get up as well. Sir James came at Inuksak and shoved him back by his shoulders, and at this, the man who had run away seized him by the arm and said in English, “Stop! You must stop!”

I saw the stranger’s face then, and I gaped, for it was a white man’s face, but I would never have recognised it as Francis Crozier’s. The daguerreotype of Crozier which Sir James had placed now on a dozen tent floors – with its taut, anxious, overstuffed air – was that of a practical man, concerned about his supplies probably, frustrated with the need to be photographed when he had real business to attend to. The man who clutched his arm now was a Desert Father, an anchorite. The colors of his skin and eyes and hair blended into the colors of his parka, and his parka blended into the landscape, but there was still something immensely jarring about his presence there. It was as if he had, not a color, but a sheen that was wrong.

The group of men quieted, stilled. In Inuktitut, the Desert Father told Inuksak, “He will apologise. I’ll make him apologise.”

“Aglooka,” said Inuksak, and brushed past Sir James – with the universal gesture of checking another man’s shoulder slightly – to grab his arm in turn and walk away with him to a distance of about twenty paces. The two of them proceeded to have an argument in Inuktitut, too quiet and too fast for me to follow, for all that I had thought I was as fluent in the language as any _kabloona_. The rest of us stood there in an awkward row, frozen in place, waiting for them to finish; I saw Sir James run his hand through his hair and shake his head as if to clear it. 

“What are they saying?” he asked me quietly.

“I cannot make it out,” I said. “But look at them.” I had seen arguments like this on every ship and in every port and in all parts of this world. It was an argument between two intelligent men, both perhaps with a flair for the dramatic, who are on the same side and yet must hurriedly renegotiate what that side is. 

Captain Crozier – for I must begin to call him that – lost the argument. Inuksak’s moral authority had carried the day, and I saw on Crozier’s face a flash of purest anxiety, the face of a man edging close to a serious loss. Inuksak slowly placed his finger at the center of Crozier’s chest; I saw the divot his finger left in the heavy fur of the parka, and it remained there as the breeze blew the fur about. Crozier looked down at the divot as if it were a wound.

Finally Inuksak took up a spear, called to the men who’d been outside the tent, and set off to the north without deigning a word. Crozier turned back to us.

“He says you can’t camp here,” he said. His accent was the purest northeastern Irish, as if he had just arrived here from Belfast after losing his way, and was asking directions.

“Frank,” said Sir James urgently, “Francis. It is you. Why won’t you look at me?”

Crozier turned to him and they held each other’s gaze. On Sir James’ face was desperate need, and on Crozier’s, a subtle, unsettled despair. Finally Aglooka said – or rather, Crozier; I do not know why my pen keeps attempting to use his Inuit name, an obvious and common nickname meaning “Strider,” and indeed the same nickname the Netsilik had once given, with more justice, to Sir James – he said in Inuktitut, “I never wanted you to come here.” 

“What did he say?” Sir James demanded, darting the briefest glance at me before turning his attention once again to Crozier. He put a gentle hand to the trim of Crozier’s hood, as if to push it down, but Crozier caught him by the wrist and pulled it swiftly away.

“Frank, what is the meaning of this?”

“He said,” I told him, “that you shouldn’t have come.”

It was coming on to late afternoon, and I touched Sir James’ arm and offered the excuse of making our camp, since we now must hike some distance to pitch it. He looked at Crozier once more, mouth open, and shook his head, and said, “Frank, it _is_ you, isn’t it?”

Crozier turned without a word and stepped into a tent. 

Sir James and I took our sledge and hiked about two miles over the ice, until the camp was no longer in sight. We pitched our own camp and Sir James made a grease fire in the local fashion that I had taught him. He did not speak to me; he looked haggard, and when I said that perhaps I might go to the Netsilik camp and see how things had settled, he only nodded over the fire.

By the time I returned it was sunset. Inuksak was back in his tent now, and I heard masculine laughter and saw the shifting colors of their parkas through the holes in the furs that covered it. Crozier, to my surprise, was still in camp too; he was in a tent alone, without a fire, hunched forward with his forearms resting on his thighs, staring at the furs as they flapped in the wind.

I introduced myself, and he did not reply. He had lapsed into a kind of catatonia, responsive to my speech but otherwise empty-faced. His stare was that of the young soldiers I have treated who have seen too much of battle. I could tell that this state was familiar to him. There is a comfort one sees in people like this; someone unaccustomed to stillness will always be unable to keep still. 

I tried to give him my calmest, most neutral manner, for it is to quiet interest and not to passion or prying that such men respond. I offered careful, professional compliments: his grasp of Inuktitut, his ability to survive in the North, the marvel of his presence in this camp. My thoughts lingered on the stories of the expedition – starvation, madness, cannibalism – which we had heard from other Inuit, and I tried and failed to see them in his mirror-like face. 

At last, I thought to mention that I am a doctor, and to ask if I could examine him. He looked at me and I saw the ghost of something sharp, something unmistakably belligerent. Then he said in Inuktitut, “Yes, you can.”

The process was accomplished limb by limb, it being so cold. First a sleeve was pulled up, then the waistband of his parka so that I could palpate him and listen to his heart. He did it all patiently, forbearingly. His face wore the same unnerving disinterest as a silvertint painting of a saint.

My most striking finding from the examination was, of course, the loss of his left hand. I had seen that he wore a mitten only on the right, and that the sleeve of his parka was cut long on the left, but I had not thought of what it meant. When I asked if I could take his pulse at the right wrist, he pushed the right sleeve skillfully up with the stump of his left hand, and thus exposed it. I took it in my hand and we looked at it together.

The cut is extraordinarily clean, just above the joint, and appears to have been done in a single stroke, although there is thick and extensive scar tissue which may stem from poor healing with scurvy (although when I asked him, he denied history of scurvy). I also asked if it had happened on board ship, and he shook his head.

“In the field, then?” I imagined, for a moment, the agonies of an amputation _en plein air_ , during a doomed and desperate walk south. He nodded.

“This cut is very clean. The doctor was skillful? You did not suffer unduly?”

“Yes. Yes. No.” English words again. A touch of irony, perhaps, in his brow.

“Are you going to tell me how it happened?”

“A friend.” He regarded me seriously. “I was saved by this.”

“Do you mean this loss has had spiritual consolations for you?”

“No. I was chained to a corpse.”

I sighed, realizing he was enjoying leading me on the chase, and was about to withdraw, when he unexpectedly said: “Dr. Macpherson, it is good to hear a Celtic voice. Easier, somehow, than an English one.”

“Anything I can do that may help, I’ll do,” I told him. “Is this hurting you?”

He shook his head, a faint curl of the lip doing for a smile. “It is helping me.”

I continued the examination of the living man, telling myself that I would deal with the corpse in its own time. I was struck by the three tattoos he bears on his forearms. The two on his right arm are skillful, but very old and faded. A third, upon the left, is fresh and so amateurish that I could not initially make out its meaning. I turned my attention first to the older ones, both standard sailors’ tattoos: a North Star (which for a sailor connotes “find my way home”), and a swallow (which marks his first 5,000 miles at sea). They were of similar vintage, and 5,000 miles at sea is not long; it is but half the distance from London to Cape Horn. Thus, they must date from his very early career. I must ask Sir James if it is common for a young volunteer, of the sort Crozier must once have been, to be thus tattooed. If, as I suspect, it is not, then he must have been rather a favorite among some early crew, difficult though it was to imagine looking at him now. He looked as beyond humor as a stone.

That impression changed when I examined the third tattoo. It had looked at first like a simple double line, but I saw now that it represented a knotted rope, and on the inner wrist were the faintly scratched words HOLD FAST. To sailors, the rope indicates a deckhand, not an officer. HOLD FAST is more typically tattooed upon the knuckles: a prayer for a firm grip on the rope, for there are many ways for a loose rope to kill a man. Upon a wrist without a hand, the joke is macabre, even without accounting for the various implications that may attach to it in this case.

“No Netsilik gave this to you,” I told him. It was impossible; it is simply not how the people of the North use tattooing, and it showed none of their skill.

“No.”

“This is your own work?”

I saw a faint twitch at the corner of his broad mouth, and an almost imperceptible nod. Something conspiratorial in his nod, something that I like.

Otherwise, I learned little from the examination. He is in good health, heart, lungs, etc., and well nourished. In addition to his tattoos and the injury to his arm, he bears the scar of an animal attack across his chest, which has healed poorly with significant keloid present. He looks much older than his age – I would have put him at 65 if I had not known he is about 54. The muscles of his left arm are atrophied, but perhaps not so much that a layman would notice. When prompted, he explained that he has learned to fish and hunt one-handed, relying upon the strength of both arms and the dexterity of the right. It is very striking that he picked up these difficult local techniques while also modifying them for his own use. 

After I thought the examination was over, he pulled down his lower lip to reveal a dark muddy line upon his gums. He said, “Note this down.”

“What does it mean?” I asked him. “You seem to know.”

“Lead,” he said, and lapsed into silence again.

“Lead?”

“Yes, doctor. Ingestion of lead.”

I stared at him. “Was your food contaminated?” – instantly the thought suggested all sorts of horrific images, although I did not immediately see in him the agitation, the paranoia, the slurred speech typical of chronic lead poisoning.

“It was poison,” he said. “All of it. We fed and nourished each other upon poison.”

I took in a breath and let myself feel the weight of his words. “I’m sorry.” 

It was the first admission I had heard of who he was, although the fact of it was obvious. I do not know whether it was my manner, the way I had handled his body, my answers to his questions, or simple loneliness that made him warm to me, but encouraged by it, I asked him why Sir James seems so hurt by his presence, and why Sir James’ presence seems to hurt him.

He said, “Because hope, Dr. Macpherson, is a cruel thing.” 

In another man’s mouth, this might have seemed a kind of platitude, but I think this man has thought a good deal about hope, and about cruelty, and perhaps the ways he himself has meted them out.

13th June.

A long uncomfortable night in the tent with Sir James; we barely spoke, and when I asked him if he wanted to, he said, “No, not now, please, John.” I lay awake worrying that Crozier would run, and thus worrying that he had become our prisoner. 

I woke with the dawn, exhausted but relieved that the night was over. Walking back through the Inuit camp, I glimpsed Crozier asleep with others in one of the tents – the markings of his parka are distinct, and so is the shape of his body, although I could not see his face – and then found Inuksak already awake by his fire. It is as if he never sleeps, though I suppose he is an ordinary insomniac like the rest of us, one who merely knows how to present himself with command.

Inuksak is a princely man. Netsilik villages have no leaders, but there are people here who are looked to for their experience and advice (in Britain, we sometimes recognise such a natural talent, but invariably we fear it too much to use it). He is a stylish man and a master storyteller. What surprised me is that he was willing to tell a false story on behalf of someone like Crozier, but when I asked him, he readily explained. This, of course, after I had apologised to him on Sir James’ behalf, and pleaded Sir James’ great emotion. He waved away the apology as if he had already forgotten the man existed.

“We did it to keep you out,” he said. “All the _kabloonas_ he knew would come looking for him.”

“So you decided it together?”

He nodded. “He understands now that when his ships come, our people die.”

“Die of what?”

He brought out his knife and began to sharpen it upon a stone. “Their starvation is contagious. Their ships can’t keep them alive, and so they try to walk away over land, and they frighten the animals so that we can’t hunt. The captains think we’re like children – and we’re kidnapped, or beaten when we misbehave, because that’s how they treat children. But you know all that. Why ask me to explain?”

“Because you let him be here,” I said. “Why is he different? Not only did he arrive here on a ship, but he was a captain. He brought the starvation here. He ordered it brought.”

“Aglooka,” said Inuksak, and there was an opaque warning in the way he said the name; he fell silent, though clearly he had been about to speak further.

“Is there something special about him? Something that makes you treat him as Netsilik?”

“No,” said Inuksak forcefully, laying down the knife. “He was a captain. He did bring his ship here. And just because he speaks our language and he’s respectful, that doesn’t make him a special kind of _kabloona_. He will never be Netsilik, and he will always be a poison, and his starvation will never stop. But.” He settled himself back a little; for a man like this, I think, it feels like weakness to show force. When he spoke again, his words surprised me. “I like him. Most of us like him.”

“Why?”

“When he came here,” said Inuksak, “he was like a child. He made himself unpleasant like a child; he wept like one, and we pitied him like one. Can you imagine losing your whole camp, losing _everyone_ , to starvation and disease? Of course we pitied him. We didn’t have enough food that year, and had to break into our reserves, but we fed him from that. We thought he was just staying until he was strong enough to go, but as soon as he was strong enough for anything, he demanded work.” He blew out an incredulous laugh. “He does all kinds of work. He never does anything else. Men’s, women’s, it doesn’t matter. He nurses the sick night after night. He cooks. He looks after the children. He hunts anything.” For a moment, Inuksak’s face dwelled warmly on the image he had called up. “He wants to stay and he makes himself useful.”

“But you call him a poison.”

“Aglooka and his crew,” said Inuksak, “ate poison for years. All the food given to them was poisonous. They had no other choice, because they couldn’t hunt. _We_ don’t have to eat him, but there’s nourishment in him, and he is only one man. You understand? A little poison won’t kill you.”

“I think I do understand,” I said. The thought had a grim resonance for me, knowing what Sir James has told me of Francis Crozier’s habitual drunkenness, and the ways some white men use a little poison to stay alive. Inuksak stared at me patiently.

“Aglooka is a _priest_ ,” he said. Something in his tone told me that this was uncharted territory for him, something he had perhaps not expected to say. He said the word _priest_ in English, but with his accent and the sheer unexpectedness of the word, it took a few moments of back and forth to establish it. 

As usual, when I recount these conversations, I omit the circumlocutions, the tentative agreements, the moments of total loss, that accompany all translations between such different languages as Inuktitut and English. I also omit some of the ways that Inuksak, especially, applied his words to English concepts in order to comment or critique. For example, he always referred to Aglooka’s crew as his “hunting party,” not because he thought that was what they were, but to convey the sense of something temporary, seasonal, which it would be deeply unnatural to imagine lasting for years.

He gave me to understand that he meant the word _priest_ in a very specific sense, to say that Aglooka was a holy man, but not that he personally acknowledged him as holy; to say that he was holy among _kabloonas_ , not Netsilik.

“Can you tell me more?” I asked him finally.

“He and I talk,” said Inuksak. “Once we talked about names, and he told me about his real, _kabloona_ name and what it means. He told me about what religion is like where he comes from. It was familiar in some ways and very strange in some ways. We both felt that way. Anyway, Aglooka is the _priest_ of his hunting party. But they’re all dead. You know?”

“Dead _and_ gone?”

“Nobody feels them here anymore,” said Inuksak. “But Aglooka feels like they’re with him. He spends all his time thinking about them, and turning them over in his mind. You’d be strange too, if you did that.” 

_Later the same day._

The sun has faded and I write by firelight. I should be asleep, but the events of the day will not seem to let me go.

Crozier came to our camp at midday, a spear slung over his shoulder from which dangled a freshly killed Arctic char. We saw him coming from a long way away, a black form that became a gray form. When he arrived he slung the fish down and said in English, “James, you realise I am not coming back with you.”

Sir James blinked at him. “Don’t tell me what I realise.”

“Well,” he said, pulling out a heavy clasp knife from the depths of his parka and looking at it in the palm of his mitten, “perhaps it was wishful thinking.” Seeing his intent, I hastened to tidy up and light our small stove – my one concession to the home comforts out here; being able to cook quickly provides a great advantage while traveling, and allows me to melt the ice inside my snow-houses to strengthen them. He opened the knife one-handed and gutted the fish while I sliced off a piece of seal fat for frying. Then he looked at Sir James through what would, I suppose, have been steepled fingers if he had had all ten: the palm of his hand pressed to the stump of the other.

“Frank,” said Sir James, still incredulous, but more gently, “What about your people? What about Sophia, Ann, _me_ – for God’s sake, I can’t even believe you’re alive. I’ve been hearing different versions of your death up and down the coast of Nunavut. Have you induced _every_ Inuit here to tell the same story that man told us?”

“I don’t induce people to do anything,” said Crozier. “Not here. Now, will you listen to me?”

“How can I listen to you when you’ve not spoken to me?” asked Sir James tightly. Truly, to hear them, I would not have imagined that there was love lost between them, or that they had only a few years ago sailed in triumph into London together, ships in trim and buttons bright, the conquerors of the Antarctic.

“Fish is on,” I announced, thinking perhaps that the conversation would benefit from a little nourishment. It is easy in the North, when the landmarks and times of day are so alien to the British mind, and where simply warming one’s own body costs exhausting effort, to become hungrier than we understand. And indeed, I could tell that after the meal, we all three felt better. Perhaps it is also that the ritual did us good. I filled my pipe and was soon peacefully puffing smoke over the rocky desolation. Sir James does not smoke, although I could tell from Crozier’s hungry glance at me that he once had. I offered him a puff, but he shook his head. He was sitting on the ground with his hand pressed to his chest, rubbing the thumb over the line of his old wound; that seemed habit enough for him. 

He looked at me and Sir James in turn. 

“You want to know what happened to us,” he said, “and I can tell you. But the story will harm you. It will not only hurt you, it will harm you.”

“Frank,” said Sir James, “I know. But the not knowing has harmed me, too. In England, I already knew what had become of you, but now that I’m here, although I know everything I did then, I also do not.” He looked at his hands, delicate and elegant in shape, but roughened by the Arctic atmosphere, and said, “Do you understand? Now that I am here, I no longer know.”

“I do,” said Crozier.

“I wish I hadn’t come. We are united in that, Frank.”

Crozier heaved a great sigh. “I suppose it was Jane who convinced you?”

“Who else? But, Francis, don’t judge her. You know how she loved him.”

“You loved me,” said Crozier, “and you’d never send anyone after me. Not here. Without her, you’d not even have come yourself. And you’d have been right to.”

“Can we not adjudicate the matter of Lady Jane?”

“Happily.” Crozier drummed his hand and his stump upon his knees. “I had thought to take you to see _Terror_.” 

“We’d been told that she’s sunk off this island,” said Sir James, leaning forward intently. “And not sunk by nature, but by men.”

“Men _are_ nature,” said Crozier, “unfortunately. But you’re right. _Terror_ lies a week’s walk up the west coast. Seeing it may help you to understand some things. I’ll have that puff after all,” he said, turning to look at me, “if I may.”

I let him finish the pipe. He still had a sailor’s habit of clamping it tightly in his teeth. 

“Thank you for offering to tell us,” said Sir James. “I mean it. I know you’re not a talker, old man. You don’t speak unless you have to.”

“James, will you stop calling me these things?”

Sir James’ face fell; he looked to the stones before him and nodded.

“May I ask one thing before you begin?” I said, accepting the return of my pipe and wiping its stem on my coat. 

Crozier shrugged.

“What became of the other captains – of Franklin and Fitzjames?”

“We’d heard Sir John died early on,” put in Sir James. “That you were in command, or that it had looked like it.”

“That is true,” said Crozier. “I was in command.”

“How did they die?”

Crozier’s mouth twisted. “Sir John’s fate will be difficult for you to understand. Let’s say for now that he was killed by a wild beast.”

“Is that a metaphor?” asked Sir James, at almost the same time that I asked, “Tuunbaq?”

“Oh, my dear God,” said Crozier. “I’d forgotten that he said the name. I wonder why he did.”

“ _Is_ Tuunbaq a man?” Sir James asked him urgently.

“No. A creature. But one with a name. Vengeful, cruel, intelligent. He pursued us for years.”

“What happened to him?”

“We killed him.”

“How?”

“Fire. Poison. Guns. A boat chain.” Crozier shook his head faintly. “In the end he choked on the body of a man.”

We all sat in silence, the wind blowing lightly through the fur of our clothing, the Arctic sun bright but wan. I think Sir James and I were both afraid to continue the line of questioning, but Crozier told us without being prompted. His voice now was more gentle than I had heard it, or thought it could be. “As for Captain Fitzjames, I killed him myself.”

“Why?”

“He begged me to.”

_Later the same day._

I did not mean to leave off my entry in such a dramatic place, but I had been writing it as Crozier returned to the camp to pick up supplies, and he arrived back here just as I wrote “he begged me to.” Not much more was said, anyhow. His words, which had come so reluctantly to him yesterday, appeared to fail him again. Tonight I am writing these few lines outside before the stove, with Crozier and Sir James already asleep in the tent. 

Crozier seemed to return from the camp in a better frame of mind, as if he had settled things with Inuksak. He came bearing a sledge with seal meat, fish, and his spears should we need more. Then we set off across the rocky scree of the island. Made good time today, 7 miles although we only started at 1 o’clock. My companions are, of course, experienced trekkers, but both went to sleep early, quite exhausted.

14th June.

Crozier told us the beginning of his story today. He does not speak as we sledge, but we pause often – we are in no hurry – and he tells us in the pauses. 

It is remarkable to see the change that has come over him since my first impression, when he seemed so blunted and lost. Now he is both commanding and careful. One can tell that he has planned our little expedition with the purpose of keeping our limbs moving and our minds a little disengaged. I can tell that this is a great deal of work for him, that it does not come instinctively, that what he wishes for most is to return to his lassitude and contemplation. With a man like this, the temptation of mystical language is always with me: the performance is an autoséance, a temporary calling up of one’s own spirit. From this man, with his glassy mien and his dead eyes and his mouth rarely open, issues forth the forceful voice of an Irish sea captain, an experienced man, shrewd as to his due, with affection for his fellow-men, but used to giving orders. I wonder at times which Crozier we are seeing. Is he the one who set off from Greenhithe in 1845, or an earlier one, or a composite, or an invention? Sir James has not seen fit to tell me. He seems profoundly depressed, and speaks little.

And the story? Does it merit the contract and the care? Thus far, it reminds me of the anecdote of the old actress playing the nurse in _Romeo and Juliet_ , who is asked the topic of the play, and explains that it is about a devoted nurse giving up her poppet to an unworthy young man. In other words, it is the tale of Francis Crozier and how Sir John Franklin ignored him, belittled him, mistook his despair for a sour mood that he ought to throw off – and all because of Crozier’s drunkenness and his tactless anger and his unpredictability. He is as angry at himself as at Franklin. 

He stops to rub his eyes; he breaks into Inuktitut as if English wounds him; he is clearly delaying, circumlocuting, to prevent himself from telling the parts of the story where the ill-conduct he describes began to weigh. I feel at times that he is recounting a chess game, in which an unsteady player is pushing his knight forward, then back, causing and anticipating problems in equal term. He loses the thread of the plot, moving backward and forward in time, doubling back to ensure a detail. His voice drips with self-loathing. At times, his eye drips with tears. 

What am I to do with this story? Shall I write it down, share it, use it to soothe or inflame the people who are waiting for it at home? Crozier plainly does not want it known. He is not speaking for publication or for posterity. Indeed, with his Penelope-like unplucking, he tries to undo every word he speaks. 

I feel that there is in the man an adamantine streak of falsehood, all too common in people of his habits. Such people may not wish to lie, but they are desperate to hide the extent of their trouble; not only do they falsify it, but they recruit others into the falsehood, making themselves frightening or pathetic in order to secure their aid. Crozier shows no signs of drinking now, nor can I imagine how he would find the means to, but the habit of lying can outlive its roots. And an habitual liar will admit anything, no matter how stained and vile, rather than the thing he is trying to hide.

I feel I am being very hard on him, knowing as I do that he fell into this way of living in order to make his own life bearable to him. That much is universal, among people with any vice. But I do resent being recruited into a lie – I rebel at it – as it happens, it is the thing I despise most in the world. I do admire him, I suppose, for not openly telling us to keep his secrets. This is, I suspect, the reason Inuksak was angry. Crozier transgressed the border of friendship in telling him what to say, and the transgression was bearable only so long as they agreed on the purpose of it.

And yet I do think I may keep his secret. We know enough terrible stories of the expedition’s final days from interviewing the local people. Perhaps we can interweave some of his detail into this story without betraying his privacy. For I do care for his privacy, even as I resent his implicit demand to keep it.

I will write one more thing of him. He is not doing this for our benefit. He is _driven_ to tell it. One is reminded of Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner, who is compelled to recount the tale of the albatross, even to sucking the blood from his wounded arm to loosen his dry tongue. He was not compelled before we came; he will not be compelled after; we were not compelled to hear him before, and we will have no more opportunity to hear him after, as I am confident of his determination never to be seen by white men again. But today, he must tell us, and we must listen. It is a compact between us, sealed over a shared fish on a blazing cold Arctic day.

Tonight, as he had just finished telling us of how he began to drink even beyond his own prodigious limits – drink to death – drink with the intent of destroying himself, after Sir John Franklin’s loss, and as the black pit of him grew deeper and we felt ourselves drawn closer to it, Sir James put his hand on Crozier’s hand and said softly, “Frank, no more. Not now.”

“I told you it would harm you,” said Crozier. All at once the captain was gone, and what was left was a softer, gentler man, a man with reserves depleted, with no expectations and no hope. “I’m sorry.”

“Frank, I know you did not do well,” said Sir James. “I –”

“You didn’t want me to come here.”

Sir James’ face clearly showed the strain of the day. “You were too broken up by the Antarctic. You went into it too tired, and – I did not like your chances of – well, it seemed that either drinking any more, or ceasing to drink, might break you. I never knew why you went back to the Arctic. You told me it was because Sophia asked you, but there was more to it. There had to be. Was it me? Was it because of what we said to one another?” He could not seem to stop speaking, now that he had begun, although Crozier had tried several times to halt him. “Was it because I was too honest, crudely honest, at the wrong time? Did I treat you as Sir John did? It’s simply that I love you so, my dear friend, and...and...”

Crozier looked down to the firelit stones of King William Land. Now that he had the chance to reply, he seemed to have lost the strength to do it. At last he said, “It doesn’t matter why, surely. Not anymore.”

“It matters to me.”

Crozier shook his head infinitesimally. “The poles weren’t finished with me. They still had something to show me. I tried once to speak to James Fitzjames about this, but he is no mystic, and so he thought I was being one.”

“I’ve never heard you speak like this.”

“I had to learn to speak like this,” said Crozier, half interrupting him. “I blamed Sophia. I blamed you, and our quarrels over marriage and whiskey. But all that was nothing to the _void_ , James.” His face was softening into its old emptiness. “I was a fool. In the end, there I was, chained to Hickey’s boat. And I found there is no void, not when you’re down among it. I ought to have listened to you.”

I had the sense not to ask then who Hickey was. Sir James seized his friend in his arms and pulled him to him, pressing his nose to the fur of his shoulder. Both of their faces seemed equally empty now, but as Crozier’s arms reached hesitantly to return the embrace, I could sense in them both a turbulent and profound emotion.

15th June.

He spoke of Hickey again today, and once again, he spoke of him as if the man needed no introduction, as if everyone knew of him: God, Satan, the Queen, and Hickey. I have a copy of the _Terror_ ’s manifest in my belongings, and I learned from it that Hickey’s forename was Cornelius and that he hailed from County Limerick, and that he was a very junior petty officer, a caulker’s mate. None of this enlightened me as to his importance. Crozier had offered Hickey a drink in his cabin; Hickey had gone with a group of other men to capture the Netsilik woman called Silna; he had condemned Hickey to be whipped, and Hickey had been whipped. There was no dimension to the figure of Hickey, and little indication of his importance to Crozier, the reason for Crozier’s fury. He did linger on the whipping itself, the twenty-three strokes of it and the slashing open of Hickey’s flesh, and how the man with the whip had stopped and he had not been able to tell him “again,” even as Hickey stood up with his cocky look, and Crozier had known that he was the same Hickey as the Hickey before. I gather that Crozier was very drunk, each day and from morning until night, by the time of this story, but it was unlike the other tales he told of his drunkenness. He identified figures in those; he identified, as always, the things he did right and wrong by them. But of Hickey there was only Hickey.

Sir James asked a strange question after the story of the whipping. He said, “Frank, what did the fellow look like?”

“He was –” Crozier’s hand strayed to his forehead. “Why do you ask that, James?”

“Was he young? Handsome?”

“Rat-faced, rather. Smug. Blond. Why? Are you saying I punished the handsome sailors differently from the plain?”

“I only wanted to know. What happened then?”

“Well, I, uh – well, James. I stopped drinking.” The words were a quick verbal shrug; I darted a glance at him, seeing with what force he changed the subject and the mood.

“For good and all?”

“Never again.” He seemed to have recovered, with great effort, the captain’s ghost. He leaned forward and gave Sir James a face that shone in the fire. “It was difficult. There was cost. Great cost. Silna was angry, and then James Fitzjames was angry, and then Thomas Blanky was not angry, although I’d given him the most cause for anger. I went through the two weeks’ agony as I had always done before, but this time, it was over.” He patted Sir James’ shoulder with his stump, unconscious apparently of the difference between his stump and his hand. “And with that, I think we must rest.” 

“Frank, what is this?”

“What?”

“This, on your wrist.” Sir James took hold of the stump, whose sleeve had fallen away, and read the words HOLD FAST below the crude rope. I had expected him to find the mark as disturbing as I had, but to my surprise, he gave Crozier a look of wicked amusement. “I remember that North Star you had from Mr. Townsend, when we were up with Parry in ’19. You were in love with the Navy then.”

“I never stopped loving it,” said Crozier, and pulled gently away.

16th June.

I am resorting once again to the code with which I write of my medical cases of the most personal nature; it is a thin code, and breakable, but I must write about what has happened, and I must at least attempt to keep the privacy of those concerned. 

Last night I awoke in my blankets to the sounds of breath. They were very quiet sounds – I would not have woken had my sleep not been shallow – but they were urgent and unmistakable. Captain Crozier and Sir James were in a state of passion for one another, and they were taking what steps they could to alleviate it.

I am not such a fool as to be surprised at what goes on between men who are accustomed to being alone with other men for months on end. Nor do I believe these things are rare. I am not a man of such predilections myself, but in the confessional of the consulting-room, people will say many things to a sympathetic doctor. I was, however, deeply embarrassed at my proximity to what was happening, especially as I could not in decency interrupt or leave. The tent is not large, and they were gasping no more than a foot away. All I could do was feign sleep. It could not be long; they were not young.

When they had finished and I thought they were asleep, I left the tent to sit under the stars. It was nearly dawn, and I witnessed a beautiful sunrise – the light’s rays painting the stones of the island. 

I suppose I am shocked, not to have heard them, but to realise that there has long been something very like a romance between them. Now that I know of it, much else about the way they speak to each other makes sense. Sir James is married, I know, and even an uxorious man; he never leaves off mentioning Lady Ann and the children. Nothing about that feels forced or as if he has other commitments. Their names come to his lips as naturally as his own breath. And yet I had heard him give that breath to Crozier, and Crozier take it eagerly. What other secrets do the men around us keep, when we hear their breathing in a shared carriage or workhouse or lonesome Arctic tent? 

_Later the same day._

I left off writing earlier because Captain Crozier came out of the tent to look at the sunrise too. Truly the man’s face is a book. The lines graven in it, the scar that slashes across his nose, between his eyes: no painter could capture all the words that face speaks, of a lifetime at sea and, now, of a second lifetime of grief and loneliness. He did not seem to be grieving now, however, only puzzled and confused. He sat down beside me and extracted the Navy canteen which he incongruously carries among his furs. 

When he spoke, it was not of the North, but of Ireland. He wanted to know news of his home country, and so hesitantly I began to explain to him of the great famine that had begun the year they sailed north. I might have kept it from him easily, but I was tired and shaken, and dissembling does not come easily to me. By the time the full sun arrived in the sky and Sir James stirred in the tent, he knew of the million dead, and the million who, like him, had emigrated.

“Did bloody Peel do anything about it?” he wanted to know, and I found myself suddenly in the absurd position of debating the acts of Downing Street with a Radical hermit of the North. I explained that Peel is out, and the Whigs have come in, and he interrupted me with rising bitterness.

“The Whigs! At least Peel would have given us the scraps of his table. So I suppose they have us paying for our aid, and dying when we can’t?”

“Yes,” I told him, knowing any other answer would make it worse. “That is exactly what they have you doing.”

“God damn it!” he ejaculated, and abruptly he seized a large stone from the ground beside him and flung it from us with all his strength. It flew a long way and there was a great clang as the shales shattered against each other. His anger unabated, he threw himself to his feet, another stone already in hand – as David must have held it when he took on Goliath – and threw this one even further. 

“Frank, what’s happened?” asked Sir James, emerging from the tent behind us.

“ _England did_!” He whirled on Sir James. “There’s no such bloody thing as _famine_! There is only the _English_! God.” He clapped his hand to his face. “I’m sorry, James, it’s not you I’m angry at. What a thing to wake up to.”

“But you _are_ angry at me,” said Sir James, without reproach or rancor. “I am English.”

Crozier shook his head. “Are they hungry even in Banbridge, I wonder? Dr. Macpherson, did it come to Down?”

I am ashamed to say that I had only the vaguest answer to this, but I conveyed to him that, apart from the cities, it had come everywhere, and certainly even to his comfortable home county of Down. The south and west of the island had been hardest hit, those places where Irish was spoken most. At this, he sighed, thought for a long moment, and then said a few dispirited, halting words in that tongue. Clearly they were not the words of a native or even a fluent speaker. I imagine he has only picked up a bit of the language, perhaps not even at home, but at sea with sailors from Limerick or Clare. 

“What did you say?” I asked him. I speak Gaelic well, but the words had been unintelligible to me.

“I _think_ I said I could have stayed and starved at home.” He smiled. ”But if I really felt that way, I wouldn’t have gone to sea as a boy and never lived there again.”

17th June.

I thought I might write again yesterday, but between my poor sleep and the growing weight of Crozier’s story, there was no chance last night. I did tell the two of them as neutrally as I could that I had been sleeping badly in the tent, it being so crowded, and henceforth would sleep out here under the stars; they looked abashed, knowing exactly what I was telling them, but since then they have seemed easier with each other and with me. In fact, something in our conversation about Ireland seems to have cemented a friendship between the three of us. Such rapid friendships do form in camp.

It is as well, for as I said, Crozier’s story grows darker. He has trusted us now with the full history of his decision to begin abstaining, and it is very horrible – madness, literal madness, and advancing courtship of death. Unspoken even by Crozier is the implication that they might have walked out a year sooner, or averted the violence which he has still not explained to us but somehow revolves around the figure of Hickey – had he not destroyed the trust of his men with his drunken rages, his thefts of alcohol from brother-officers, and his arbitrary and dangerous orders. I was reminded of Captain Bligh, another great navigator whose brutality undid him. Sir James has told me that as a young midshipman, Crozier had actually met the last survivor of Bligh’s mutineers at the Pitcairn Islands. No doubt he remembers this vividly. 

This is not the place to expound upon dipsomania, a disease which kills both the brain and the body, and which murders one by degrees in the eyes of one’s loved ones. But one true marvel about the dipsomaniac drive is the way that it reveals the nonexistence of the self – I mean the fact that we may have one self when we are drunk, and another when we are sober, and neither self is the “true” one. I am reluctant to say that Crozier is a kind and upright man who, under the influence of alcohol, becomes a cruel and even violent one. That is merely an excuse for his violence – and even sober, I have seen hints of his cruelty. But it would be a far more absurd fallacy to say he is a cruel and violent man whose true nature is only revealed in drink. That is why I say that he is both men, or has been both. The self, the soul, has some weight, yes. There is a Polaris in each of our natures. But to navigate by it requires hard, painful work, and I think this good man learned that work too late.

18th June.

He tells us of images no one should have to witness. He tells us of Sir John Franklin’s severed leg, reverently placed in a crude coffin painted with handles. He tells us of Dr. Stanley, his face done up clown-white, and the small stiff gesture by which he made of himself a skull in flames. He tells us of a sailor dressed as an old woman, screaming as he crawled to his death. A tent painted in facsimile of England, burnt and open to the sky, full of charred logs that once were men. A seaman and a ship’s boy bisected and placed together, one’s torso upon the other’s legs. The wet brains of a sailor mad with poison, spilled upon the gravel of King William Island. 

One thing that has struck me: he does not mention when things changed between him and James Fitzjames. At some point, Fitzjames ceased to be what he had always been to him – which is to say a man it galled him to notice – and became, instead, a dear friend. But he offers no special scene, no turning point, no words said. The loathed Fitzjames is simply replaced with the beloved one, and yet there is no sense of anything missing in the story. To hear him tell it, the replacement was as natural as a change of season.

Certainly it had something to do with a change in Fitzjames himself, who was made to reckon with his own frivolousness and vanity, as Crozier was made to reckon with his short-sightedness and rage. They both appear to have learned to recognise the ways that the vices of a captain can be literally, and all too readily, fatal to his men. But this alone does not explain it, nor does Crozier’s finding his way to temperance. What was it that happened?

My first, instinctive thought (the sounds of passion in the tent; “Was he young? Handsome?”) was that I was looking at another of these queer sailors’ romances. Certainly Fitzjames _was_ extraordinarily handsome. In the daguerreotype Sir James carries, he carries himself with the confidence of a man who knows his youthful beauty has built up into something more solid and lasting. But of course, I dared not ask, until Sir James asked for me.

We were sitting by the evening stove. Crozier was absent-minded again, sitting hunched with his arms in his lap, looking at the reddened coals. All on King William Land was, for the moment, peaceful.

Then I became aware of Sir James’ eyes on me. I lifted mine to meet them. He was giving me a shrewd assessing look, a look that may as well have said, “Can I trust you?” I’m sure my own look conveyed only confusion and doubt; I knew of what he was thinking, and in point of fact, I did _not_ know if he could trust me, or what that trust would mean. Another secret to be kept? But this one, I could not resent, for I could not imagine telling it. What could it ever gain me, apart from the peace of mind that comes of laying one’s troubles on a friend’s back? I have no friends close enough, anyway, to carry this one. 

Perhaps Sir James would have trusted me less, had my look conveyed ready assent. In any case, I had passed muster, even with this most exacting of captains, for he turned to Crozier and asked as if he had not a care in the world, “Was there anything between you and Fitzjames, old man? Really?”

“No,” said Crozier. “No, there wasn’t time to think of it.” 

Crozier’s eyes were on me, too, and I saw in them an instruction to seal my lips. I sensed that this was an old, old compact between the two men: to decide together, by silent consent, whom to tell. I must admit that now that I am entrusted with the secret, I feel humbled more than anything. It is a very great one, and neither of them truly knows me.

But to return to Fitzjames. Perhaps there is no point in putting words to what Crozier felt for him. It is plain that for the two of them, it went beyond words, and that it consoled them wholly as they contemplated their parting; it only became a wound when Fitzjames was gone. Crozier told us, “He never stopped talking. Not until we’d put him in the boat. He lived for two nights after we’d put him in the boat, and in those two nights, I did everything for him, but all we said was each other’s names. He only started speaking at the end, when he had made up his mind to let go and spill his reserves. Even then, his body was too strong. His strength outlived him. That’s why he asked me to help him.”

“What happened?” Sir James asked him.

“His old wounds had burst open, and they had become infected, and he was awash with the scurvy. He was in agony. He took my hand – he was dying –”

I wondered if he knew that he was echoing the words he had asked Inuksak to say of himself.

“He told me, ‘Help me. Help me out of it.’ Mr. Bridgens put a bottle of poison into my hand and showed me how to rub it down James’ throat, for he could no longer swallow. And –“ His mouth tightened; he shook his head. “That was all. His face became very beautiful. I sat up with him all night.”

“ _Brothers_ , indeed,” said Sir James to me that night, after Crozier had gone to bed. “That was a wedding, John.” 

19th June, _morning_

What am I doing here, in this spillage of stone, with these two men who are in love with one another? I barely slept last night; I felt the stones below my body, which I had thought so long accustomed to a cold and uneven bed, as if they were accusatory fingers. 

To think I was so wrong about Sir James. He is no comfortable retired man; he never was comfortable, and he never did retire, only folded the game when he saw his hand was losing. Crozier saw his own hand and pressed on, that’s all. 

I have been a traveler all my life. I have gone up and down the Hudson’s Bay Company lands, selling my medical skills in exchange for money and game, and after a while, when I realised I needed no money and could hunt my own game, I ceased to exchange them for anything but the knowledge that I had given people relief. Hunters and traders with tumors in their faces, with bloody gums. I have traveled northwest as far as the mountain of Denali, and northeast, many times, to Nunavut. 

I have always traveled to learn more about people, and more about myself. The two of them traveled for many reasons – orders, science, adventure, pleasure, Empire – but at heart, I believe they did it to learn less about people, and less about themselves. They traveled in order to disappear. I no longer understand if they know it, or whether wisdom lies in that after all.

And then there is the matter of their love. I was a fool, just a few days ago, to write of myself as the sympathetic doctor who hears men and women tell of their problems. I forget that no one goes to the doctor because he is happy. How many _happy_ couples are there, disguised as master and man, as lady and companion, or simply as bachelors or old maids living quietly and productively together in the little towns of the empire? How many who don’t see themselves as having any kind of problem, and who only worry about being caught? 

I feel there is one more piece of knowledge that I have, and which Crozier and Sir James do not, and which I would rather cut out my tongue now than tell them. Fort Resolution is not a place that could save a hundred starving men; it is not a place that could save thirty. It is a little log trading post, barely manned, on the shore of Great Slave Lake, and even if they had reached it, they would have found it no more than a waystation on their road to Hell.

Crozier knew that he would never bring his men there. I understand that implicitly, simply from the way he speaks. Their chances were zero. But I think that even he dreamed of Fort Resolution, and all that the image calls up in the mind’s eye: a shining fortress of virtue, like something from the _Pilgrim’s Progress_. A place where a man who knows he is bad may imagine himself good. 

20th June.

Today we came to the wreck of the _Terror_ , and Crozier told us the last of his story.

This portion, I do not care to transcribe. It is not that the story is incendiary. It is, in many ways, rather dull. Stories of depravity always are. It’s not difficult to destroy another person; you may do it the same way every time and always succeed. But if depravity is produced in the factory – just as knives and bullets are – that does not mean the knife or the bullet does not need to be removed, does not cause infection, cannot kill.

It was about sunset when we came to the wreck. The ship lies some distance offshore, a brief tramp over smooth new ice. All that is left of it is the tip of one mast. It is picked clean now, by people or by weather; it could be mistaken for the tip of a tree, in a place where there are trees. To me it looked like nothing. To Crozier, however, the sight was clearly moving, and he walked reverently to the polished wood and pressed his forehead and remaining hand to it. Sir James stood with his hand on Crozier’s shoulder. 

“Here she is,” whispered Sir James.

“With corpses below,” said Crozier, sounding rather clogged about the face. “You would have heard about this.”

“They always speak of a man with long teeth,” said James. “That is scurvy, I think. They opened the ship and they found an enormous man with long teeth – one hears it in story after story. It must have disturbed them greatly. I know they took things, too, though I can’t blame them, do you?”

“No. Of course not.” Crozier cleared his throat. “I want you to know that I didn’t abandon any men on _Terror_.”

“Of course you didn’t.”

“They volunteered to stay. And, James, they sailed her again. The ice broke, and they sailed her again – we could have stayed and starved in perfect comfort – but they died before they could sail south. They had orders to wait for us, and we were gone. They waited and starved waiting.”

“I find that unlikely, Frank,” said Sir James urgently. “They would have disobeyed the order if they had the strength to. People want to live.”

“They do.” Crozier straightened up, his hand on the wood of the mast. “That’s what I have to tell you about tonight.”

“They told me that people had made a hole by the waterline, to get in. And then the ice melted and the ship went straight to the bottom.”

“It did. I’ve seen it.”

“You saw it?”

“I couldn’t not.” Crozier pulled himself away from the mast. “The man with the long teeth was George Kinnaird, I think. They buried him by putting him in a cabin and locking the door. They wrote RIP over his head on a sign.”

“Frank,” said Sir James urgently, “Come home with me.”

“I brought you here to show you why I can’t come home.”

“Because you’d be blamed? Because you lost the ship? You did all that you could. The things you’ve told me, how you nursed the men when they were dying, no one could have done any better. Like a pelican, that is supposed to feed its young its blood. Do you imagine it would be bad for the _Irish_ if you came back, having lost all this? Frank, you can be incognito – we can find some way to smuggle you into the country, if you wish –”

“It’s for James Fitzjames to indulge in little disguises, not me,” said Crozier gently. “I am not staying here because I lost my ship, and I am not going back with you. I would not for the whole world.”

“Then what is seeing this supposed to prove, other than to make me feel wretched? Do you mean that you have some _duty_ to the ship?”

“It’s not duty. It’s none of that. Look, James, let’s go back to shore and make our camp. It’s getting late.”

We trudged back to shore, pitched the tent, lit the fire. Sir James still seemed distraught, Crozier keeping his own counsel. Nonetheless, after we had eaten our dinner of seal meat and pemmican, and I had lit my pipe, Crozier took him into his arms and lay belly to back with him, not speaking. Sir James is not a large man – he is smaller than Crozier, who although broad and stoutly built is rather short – and he seemed much shrunken since we left _Enterprise_ together. On that ship, he was still the hero, and now he seems too small even for his clothing.

Still, he said, “Oh, Frank, just go on and tell us what happened with Hickey. You’ve had me in suspense long enough.”

Crozier smiled; in fact, he beamed. His whole large face, its size exaggerated by his wiry beard and his receded hair, seemed to radiate goodwill from every wrinkle and mole. “I _have_ missed you, James. I _will_ miss you.”

“I shall miss you always,” said Sir James soberly. “Now, let’s have it, if you have it in you. I want to hear about the thing that made you decide you had to stay.”

“You reject the feint with _Terror_.”

“Come now, Frank, I reject it utterly.”

“Was it a feint?” I felt the need to speak up. “You seemed moved enough.”

Crozier really seemed to have to remember that I was there. He gave me a flat, serious look, and I sensed once again how carefully he is stage-managing this whole business, and yet how uncontrolled the story is for him. He is his own director and his own actor, and he is providing himself a stage with care, but when he goes upon it to speak, he does not know what he will say. Then he patted Sir James’ hand and told us the story of Hickey’s boat.

I feel the need to say something of it. Even having made up my mind to say nothing, the story churns in my guts; it makes me unwell. There are so many types of poison in Crozier’s story, and at times, I find myself analysing them in order to try and forget what I am hearing. What did Dr. Goodsir use, in his wild and vengeful suicide? It must have been potent indeed, to nearly kill Crozier, who had forced himself to swallow that single piece of Goodsir’s callused sole. To travel such land with dying men, hauling the chain that bites into your fingers, your face still weeping blood and a good man’s body buried in your gut – it is a fever. The story is not like that, the acute poison. The story is a chronic poison, gathering in the lips and the lungs, contaminating the breath. It will never leave us. We cannot live long enough for it to drain away.

Sir James did not stir during the telling. He looked at the fire. When Crozier was finally finished speaking, he finally said, “I think I understand.”

“You do?” A quickness came to Crozier’s features; it seemed a very new piece of information to him that anyone might understand.

“You cannot come home. And it’s not because you ate of him, although, God, Francis – “ Sir James’ breath came in quick bursts “ – you must have hated yourself in that moment.”

Crozier shook his head a little, and said laboriously, “It was one of the few moments when I did not. I felt only – “ A long moment passed. “I thought of something Thomas Blanky once said. You knew Thomas, you knew he wasn’t one for adages, but he looked to me the night we were frozen in, and he told me, ‘My grandmother always told me, Francis, man plans, God laughs. _Mann tracht, un Gott lacht_.’ Is that German, James?”

“I don’t know.”

“It is Yiddish,” I said absently. “Your Mr. Blanky must have had Jewish family.”

“He must have had. He never told me. All I knew was he cared even less for the Church of England than I do.” Crozier sat up, blinking at the firelight, and Sir James got up too, and paced the stones for a bit. The stove fire illuminated the mast of the ruined ship, picked it out in faintest gold before a grand background of stars. For a moment our impression was only of beauty.

Crozier said, “James, you know that explorers don’t care about discovering things. You were the same as me. We never had a choice; we were ordered to it as young men, and then we were filled with it.” He smiled a little and shook his head. “There has never been a Discovery Service. There are people here, living. In the Southern Ocean, there were things to name – mostly after you – but how could we have discovered them when they weren’t hidden? They were hardly small. I’m sorry. These must be old, old thoughts to you.”

“No,” said Sir James urgently, sitting back down by the fire, “go on.”

“There is an undiscovered country,” said Crozier, “but not death. Death is all too discovered. Thomas Blanky and James Fitzjames have been exploring it now –” and his eyes filled with tears, but he pressed on speaking “—for, hm, what year is it?”

“1850, Frank. It’s 1850.”

“For two years. It seems longer. It seems forever.”

“The undiscovered country, Frank –”

Crozier leaned forward intently. “ _Between_ us and death. It’s the country of – desperation. Of being unable to go on, and yet going on. That country is my home, and, James –” He caressed Sir James’ face. “I am afraid it’s your home, too.”

“It is,” said Sir James, stricken. “You know it is.”

“But it’s an invisible country,” Crozier went on. “You can only find it when your feet stumble on the stones, when you are hauling on Hickey’s chain, when James is dying in your arms, in the instant before you fall, that’s our country. The night I danced with you at the ice ball –”

“We were at the embassy of our land.”

“It is the reason I came back from the Antarctic twice the drunk I had been before I left. It is the reason you came back exhausted, and slowed –”

“And drinking too, Frank.”

The corner of Crozier’s mouth twitched. “Unfortunately, drinking shows that country to you, but with all of its dread and none of its wonder.”

“It is a beautiful country,” said Sir James thickly.

“Yes.”

“Do you live there now?”

“No,” said Crozier. “I don’t suppose I’ll ever see that place again.”

The night passed imperceptibly into sleep, the three of us lying on the stones around the dying fire. Discomfort woke me in the small hours, and I raised my head from the ground to find my companions gone. There was a bright moon, and my eyes picked them out on the ice. They were standing by the mast of _Terror_ , with George Kinnaird and his dead companions under their feet. Sir James’ hands held Crozier’s shoulders; their forehands touched, and they were swaying slightly together to some inaudible music. The knowledge broke over me that there are so many more things in heaven and earth than any one person can know.

**Author's Note:**

> As always, I draw heavily on David Woodman's _Unraveling the Franklin Tragedy: Inuit Testimony_ for information on the Franklin Expedition's aftermath.
> 
> Dr. John Macpherson is a fiction. The Scottish translator in episodes 1 and 10 of _The Terror_ is probably meant to be either Thomas Abernethy or Dr. John Rae, and while Dr. Macpherson does share some traits with Rae, I chose to write him as an original character to provide myself more room to improvise. 
> 
> Early readers who come back to reread will notice that I originally used the name "Dr. John Robertson" for this character; I've changed it after a commenter pointed out that "John Robertson" was in fact the name of a doctor who served with Crozier in the Antarctic _and_ was present on Ross' search for Franklin! Since I really am committed to making this an original character, I've edited in another generic Scottish name, after first Googling this time. 
> 
> I have based my characterization of Sir James Clark Ross on his portrayal in the series rather than do much research into the historical man, although of course his closeness to Crozier, his depression and drinking toward the end of his life, and the significance of a dance on the ice to Ross and Crozier are historical.
> 
> Most of my stories in this fandom share a continuity; this one is mutually exclusive with “Phantom Pain,” but carries over the name and characterization I gave to the Netsilik Hunter in that story. As I wrote in the note to "Phantom Pain," any errors in portraying 19th century Netsilik life are my own, not my research sources’, and I have tried to portray these characters with care while recognizing the limitations of my perspective.
> 
> I’m indebted to @attheborder for telling me more about Ross and for a beta read, and to @jackmarlowe for a beta read and for informing me that “Man plans, God laughs” is an accidental reference to Edwin Landseer’s gory Franklin Expedition painting, “Man Proposes, God Disposes.”


End file.
